ComingUp

This is "coming-up 13209 1215088 ComingUP demo" by Northwestern U. Knight Lab on Vimeo, the home for high quality videos and the people who love them.

What it does

Coming Up is a mobile event aggregator for anyone who wants
to cut down the time it takes to find out what is going on around them. With
today’s abundance of not only events, but also event hosting platforms,
searching for the perfect thing to do can be a time consuming and frustrating
process. But with a few swipes and scrolls, Coming Up presents users with a
consolidated and easily navigable list of all major events happening near them.
Events are further grouped by category and when “liked” are shown in
chronological order for an even simpler browsing experience.

These features take away the frustration we often feel when
trying to make plans when there are almost too many options to choose from.
Coming Up allows users to quickly find events pertinent to them and start
enjoying them quicker!

How it works

Using the Eventful, Eventbrite, and MeetUp APIs, we are able
to gather an array of events. Using the user’s latitude and longitude, we make
a request to each of the APIs for events happening near them. Event data
(photo, description, location, etc.) is then sent back from each of the three
sources. Because our data isn’t coming from a single source, we must then put
all event data into a single format. Once we have it all on one format,
the app sorts events into categories that originally came from the APIs and
that we also further standardized into the four main buckets. For example, we
grouped “Sports,” “sports” and “fitness” categories in one category bucket. We
then return a sample of each category, and display it to the user.

The user can then swipe and scroll through events in each
category in the user interface. If the user wants to learn more about an event,
they can tap on the event and a description and event URL will drop down. If
the user wants to save the event, they can click the “like” button and the
event will be saved for later viewing at the bottom of the screen. By
clicking on the saved section, users will then be shown a chronological list of
all the events they liked.

Because Coming Up is a mobile-first platform, we used the
Phone Gap and Ionic frameworks to develop it. This allowed us to build our app
(both front and back end) using Javascript/HTML/CSS rather than building a
native app in iOS/Android.

Key Technologies:

Phone Gap, Ionic Frameworks

Node JS, Express
and AngularJS

Eventful, Eventbrite and Meetup
APIs

Next Steps

The biggest next step for Coming Up is to create an
algorithm to learn what events each user is most interested in, based off the
events he or she likes, and then present more of the same events. We wanted to
focus this feature on how “active” or “participatory” a user wants to be in the
event. For example, a user might frequent the entertainment page and likes
comedy events. But rather than just watch comedy shows, this user prefers
improvisation classes and artistic comedy events that he gets to be involved
in. We would consider this “high participatory level.” In this next step,
we would like to be able to further categorize events based off of the
“participatory level” the user most often shows interest in. We would then
present to him or her more events of this similar level, or put them higher up
on the feed.

We would also like to add a search bar to the app. While the
aim of the app is to expose users to a variety of events, a search bar would
give users the opportunity to look for specific things, which could be
beneficial.

For this app to be even more successful, we also would like
to make requests from other event websites’ APIs and have the app run faster
with caching.

The Coming Up home screen will default to the list of featured events retrieved from various event websites’ APIs.

Liked events will be stored in chronological order so that users can easily scroll through an even more tailored list of events, furthering his or her ability to quickly find the perfect event to attend.

Users will be able to swipe left or right through the four different event categories—Featured, Entertainment, Sports and Food. For each event listed users will have the option to “Like” the event. To see the full list of Liked Events, users simply need to click on the black bar at the bottom of the screen.